News Agency

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In this exclusive report, Ilford-based news blog and website HEM News Agency has announced it will launch its first ever media packs today to help promote the blog to public relations professionals and companies looking to reach out to new audiences.

Media packs, also known as ‘media kits’, are promotional documents traditionally used in the printed and online media industries to attract advertisers to work with the publications. In an increasingly online world where many bloggers have become influencers, guiding their readers’ tastes in everything from fashion to parenting, brands are waking up to the potential of working with bloggers to advertise and promote.

In fact the past five years has seen an explosion in both brand-blogging partnerships and bloggers producing their own media packs to bring in advertising revenue. Both of these factors have gone hand-in-hand with the emergence of blogging as an activity that can bring in money. Many well-established blogging personalities have sung the praises of the media pack, providing handy advice, tips and even ready-made templates to guide their peers in what was once something solely associated with the ‘mainstream media’.

A media pack is essentially a blog’s CV (resumé) which will often display short bios of the site and its blogger, as well as statistics such as reader demographics, pageviews and traffic figures drawn in via systems such as Google Analytics. They are made available to brands or their PR representatives who are looking for blogs targeted at particular audiences, for example dog owners might be sought out by a company that markets canine toys and chews.

HEM News Agency has had several successful tie-ins producing reviews and promotional features for a variety of companies across the globe. In 2018 alone, the blog has teamed up with the New Yorker online invitation firm Paperless Post, London-based cycling safety equipment startup CYCL, and just this month, an email management service, Campaign Monitor. The blog’s owner/editor/writer, Vijay Shah, had recently decided to develop promotional tools to distribute to current and future partners to help present a professional, business side to the blog. While the blog is mainly focused on disseminating news without commercial consideration, it also produces feature posts, which provide good opportunities for interested brands.

The media packs released today were designed in-house with online designing software and are branded with the blog’s name and livery. There are two versions, a short one-page document which summarises the blog and its achievements, and a longer multi-page version which explores the blog deeper from a commercial angle. The packs will be made available in PDF format as downloads via a dedicated page on HEM News Agency’s site.

The new packs can be downloaded from the Media Pack tab in the menu just above the header of the blog.

The first zebra crossings appeared on the streets of the United Kingdom in 1949, where they were introduced on a trial basis at 1,000 different locations. Originally, they were anything but zebra-like, being kitted out in blue and yellow alternating stripes, before the current standard was adopted a couple of years later.

These days, in much of the world, zebra crossings are an important feature in both road safety and pedestrian locomotion, but have always stuck out as rather mundane. A line of black and white stripes is not much of a crowd pleaser when you look at it. The only time zebra crossings became famous was the Abbey Lane crossing in London, which was immortalised on the front cover of the ‘Abbey Road’ album released by The Beatles in 1969. That humble north London road feature was catapulted to fame, much like the band themselves, and is still a tourist attraction.

That is until today. In 2017 a small Icelandic town decided to install a zebra crossing, mainly to keep the brakes on speeding drivers passing through the area. Ísafjörður, a fishing community in the north-west of the island, however was not interested in the bog-standard black-and-white flat road markings zebras normally use. Being Scandinavians and talented at combining function and design, the town council instead opted to create a roadside optical illusion, as beautiful as it is functional.

They painted a line of 3D stripes across the road, and using shadows, the painted stripes resemble solid rectangular white blocks that look like they are floating above the ground. This exciting development in road safety is not just aesthetically pleasing. It also gives pedestrians the feeling of floating on air as they cross the street and drivers are so entranced by the floating stripes they have to slow down to take the peculiar sight in. It is a win-win for everyone.

The 3D crossing was designed as an art installation by street painting company Vegmálun GÍH, who were requested for assistance by Icelandic environmental commissioner Ralf Trylla. Trylla drew inspiration from similar road crossings in New Delhi, India, produced by the city’s New Delhi Municipal Council, albeit with yellow ‘blocks’. The Delhiite crossings proved so successful that the council there plans to paint forty more of them. Similar crossings have also been installed in China and the Republic of Ireland.

You can see specially commissioned photographs of the Iceland 3D zebra crossing by Ágúst G. Atlason of Gústi Productions in the article by Bored Panda, which originally covered this feature, in the Sources section below. You can also see the crossing in action with the mini-documentary featured with this article.

If you are a cyclist, or just happen to know someone who lives and breathes hi-viz, Lycra, and the wind through their hair while getting about on pedals and two wheels, you will know that cycling is a fun, adventurous and healthy sport. But like any sport, cycling comes with risks, and especially for urban cyclists, the roads of our cities are hazardous places where dangers can be unexpected.

On any road network, junctions pose the most danger for cyclists. According to the UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), 75% of the 19,000 bicycle accidents a year in the country happen at junctions, where cyclists are forced to contend with often heavy traffic flows, large vehicles and blind spots. Many of these accidents are caused by drivers not spotting cyclists or being unaware of a cyclist making a turn at a crossroads. Today, a quarter of accidents involving cars and cycles are caused by drivers’ failure to judge cyclists’ paths, especially at night, where hand signals by cyclists may not be noticed by drivers. It is this type of statistic that has also discouraged many from taking up daily cycling. Whilst the number of commuters has increased by 144% over the last decade, 68% of non-cyclists still believe it is too dangerous to cycle on the roads, making cycle safety a key issue now more than ever.

Unlike cars, bikes have no way of indicating changes in direction, but a freshly minted technology startup dedicated to producing innovative cycling safety equipment has a solution to help reduce the large numbers of cycling injuries and deaths on Britain’s roads.

CYCL, a London-based cycling technology startup managed by co-founder and chief technology officer, Agostino Stilli, launched a revolutionary new product, WingLights, in 2015, with help from public donations raised via Kickstarter crowdfunding. This simple, yet ingenious, technology involves LED devices attached to the cyclist’s bicycle handlebars, which behave like the turn signals on motor vehicles. Designed to be lightweight, waterproof, shockproof and robust for outdoors use, the product was featured on the BBC programme ‘Dragons’ Den’ in 2017, where it was backed by dragon Nick Jenkins. The gadget was publicised on WIRED, Business Insider and Forbes, and was adopted as the ‘Future of Transport’ by the UK Government.

WingLights began to light the way for cycling safety innovation and in the three years since they were launched, CYCL has fitted 50,000 devices to bikes, including the entire delivery fleet at the British arm of the takeaway restaurant chain Domino’s Pizza.

Three years after its launch, CYCL has returned to Kickstarter to raise money for the latest iteration of WingLights, inspired by the feedback left by the gadget’s users and the original project’s supporters from Kickstarter. One story in particular stuck out. A cyclist going for a coastal ride in Dorset lost both her front and back lights and retained visibility on her route only by tapping WingLights repeatedly for hours before getting home safely (the original WingLights switch off automatically after 45 seconds). There was a clear need for a steady light mode to provide constant visibility.

CYCL’s design team went back to the drawing board, developing an enhanced version of the WingLights with permanent white/red side light functions. They also added an improved utility function where all the cyclist needs to do is snap the gadget on the ends of the bike’s handlebars and switch on: one tap for flashing indicators, and a continuous hold for steady side lights.The new version, WingLights360, also comes packed with a helpful selection of new key features to help keep cyclists safe. Constructed from CNC aluminium for strength and lack of bulk, the devices are attached to the handlebars using magnets, and when not in use, can be tucked away on the person as a handy keyring. Perfect for the commute, they are now USB rechargeable, with a 3 hours battery operation interval and can be charged in under 30 minutes. The product has already become hot property before its impending launch with Forbes magazine naming WingLights360 their Forbes’ Top Cycling Gadget for 2018.

CYCL is one of a breed of startups catering to previously unexplored and poorly catered-for technological markets and is highly passionate about improving cyclists’ safety on the roads. The firm’s co-founder, Luca, said: “We have created a product based on the concept that motor vehicles have white and red side lights. We wanted to recreate this for the bicycle market, to ensure cyclists’ positioning and intentions are clear to other road users”.

CYCL officially launched the WingLights360 fundraiser to the general public this past Tuesday (11 September 2018). You can donate to the fund at this Kickstarter page. Send enquiries to info@cycl.bike .

They say that life is full of surprises and great things. And, indeed, you’ve just run into a whole bunch of them. Your sister has just had a baby boy, your friend has got his wedding date finally confirmed and the tinpot dictator of a manager at the office you have had to force yourself to be rictus grin nice to is leaving for a new position. Card buying season is making its presence felt but that same life of surprises usually consists of working all the hours thrown your way while juggling gym, hobbies, family time and all that jazz. You haven’t bought a greeting card since Take That split and running from pillar (box) to post (office) to buy stamps and envelopes just seems, well, tedious.

Even if you manage to get time to go out and actually do some shopping around, you will inevitably find yourself either stuck at the supermarket looking for an off-the-shelf card with a generic printed message and a pen that hopefully will not run out of ink halfway through writing in the blasted thing, or you’re at a stuffy printer’s shop trying to haggle a discount on a thousand wedding invites to be delivered ASAP. Because you procrastinated. And procrastination is a thing. You really need something more instant and fuss-free.

So send an E-card they said, it’ll be novel, cute and quick as a flash they said. But aren’t e-cards a bit tacky and cheap-looking? Surely good old card and paper seems like, well, you are actually even slightly bothered about this momentous and life-changing special occasion. Not forgetting that actual invitations and cards you can hold in your hand, keep and read at your leisure has a great permanency and intimacy that a few hundred pixels on a screen just cannot achieve. Well think again.

While in days gone by, e-cards were the height of gawdy electro-kitsch with their eye-bruising colours, goofy Clipart images and cat memes galore, a company based in the design capital of New York made the very smart decision a few years back to drag the much-maligned e-greetings industry kicking and screaming to the drawing board for a makeover fit for the 2010s.

Paperless Post is an online company that offers a wide selection of online invitations, ‘save-the-dates’, greetings e-cards and flyers to suit every occasion. Their stated ambition is to produce customisable online stationery that enables customers to create well-designed and personal items for that extra-special touch.

With their contemporary and inspiring creations worthy of a design gallery, not to mention their cute pigeon logo harking back to the days of carrier pigeon post and Yankee Doodle cartoons on a Saturday morning, Paperless Post have become well-established enough to have scored collaborations with leading designers and lifestyle brands in the U.S., including Kate Spade New York, Oscar de la Renta, Jonathan Adler, and Rifle Paper Co. The company has generated more than 85 million cards to date, both in virtual and printed format, so even traditionalists and people who simply don’t have a computer or an internet connection that ever moved past dial-up can still receive an invite or card via Paperless.

I was invited by Paperless Post to try out their services for myself and had a go making a greetings card for the Hindu festival of Diwali – one of my favourite occasions, which you can see at the beginning of this review. The first thing that struck me about their website was just how amazingly appealing it was to my ‘inner designer’ ‘s eyes. With heaps of prominent imagery framed in soft pastels on just the home page, the site alone could win a design award or two.

While many websites that invest heavily in aesthetics end up neglecting the basics of good navigation, Paperless Post strikes a happy balance between the two. All of the company’s categories of offerings, such as graduation, birthday and festivals, are in a clear, minimalist and straightforward menu up top, so no need to go on an Livingstonian expedition around the site to find what you are looking for.

Like pretty much every e-tailer, you first need to sign up and create an account. You can go for the usual option of registering via an email address, but for the social-media-savvy, you can also sign up via Facebook or Google accounts too. Once done, it’s just the small matter of choosing a design and stationery item. Paperless offers both pre-designed customisable templates and an ‘upload your own’ option that enables you to upload photos and create something truly personal.

I chose to create a Diwali card. I was pleasantly surprised to find lots of designs which were culturally appropriate as well as gorgeous. I selected the ‘Under the Toran’ design with its array of flowers in a garland suspended on a luxurious white heavy paper background.

Once you have chosen your preferred style, it’s time to customise. There is a lot of flexibility in the choices, and you can adapt nearly everything from the typeface, colour and size of the card text, to the background behind the card when it’s opened and the colour and feel of the cyber-envelope to put your card in. The attention to detail offered by Paperless Post is such that you can add a vintage letterpress effect to your text and add the finishing touches of a cute little stamp and postmark to the front of the envelope upon completion. There’s the possibility too of choosing the pattern you prefer for the inside of the envelope, which Paperless Post dubs the ‘liner’ – very posh!

I found the user interface intuitive and offering a lot of wiggle room, although manipulating the text for the inside of the card was quite fiddly at first, but I soon got the hang of it, aided by the fact I had some experience designing graphics online using third-party websites. Although you don’t have to be a design expert, some technological prowess is helpful, although those who really struggle can get guidance from the ‘Help’ page.

To move between different stages you can click the ‘next’ and ‘back’ arrows (as seen in the image above) or on the menu to the left. The menu is also where you can find the patterns you need and you can play around with different combinations of design to see what fits and what looks great before you finalise everything.

Once the card or invite is complete, you can type in the recipients’ names and emails, and save them into a handy ‘address book’ for future use. The site also offers the option of reviewing the finished product by sending a test copy to yourself, as well as an RSVP facility for your loved ones to respond with messages or other details. You can also track the progress of your item once it’s sent, and even see if it has been opened yet, so no more barely believable claims about ‘the invitation must have got lost in the post’.

Paperless Post uses its own in-house virtual currency, simply called coins, which you will need to purchase before using the site. Coins can be spent on design elements and mailing out to recipients and it’s said to cost less to send an e-card en masse to, say, a hundred people, than if you went out to the local printers and ordered a bulk lot. You also save a bundle on postage and stationery costs too. Prices are not immediately clear when you choose designs, but you can see how many coins you have in your account via your dashboard.

The website was quite clear and helpful in leading me on my journey from template to sent email, with a varied range of different contemporary designs and styles to choose from. I really liked the concept of a card without the paper (and paper cuts). It is a cool and personal touch, and ideal for the environmentally conscious and those who like the instant nature and realistic feel of sending a Paperless Post e-card. It’s also money-saving (as in not having to go out and buy a card, envelope, stamps and all that malarkey) so making Paperless Post ideal for much convenience and less headaches. The sort of inner peace that you just can’t obtain from running around trying to get cards printed and posted before the party plans go up in ink and smoke.

The card I designed was so realistic and detailed, right down to the texture of the ‘paper’, that I had to honestly remind myself not to try and peel it off my laptop screen. The animation of the envelope appearing onscreen and opening to reveal the card emerging is a nice little gesture too, another sign of the attention to detail Paperless Post is famous for.

I guess the supermarket card display won’t miss me too much now I can get my cards straight from a cute website and its little pigeon.

DISCLOSURE: The author was sponsored by the company mentioned in this review and received an incentive in order to fully utilise the product, but opinions and experiences mentioned in the post are the author’s own.

As you may have noticed, the blog is looking a little different nowadays. Today is the fifth anniversary of its founding (back in April 2012) and I decided that to mark the occasion, I would give the blog a makeover. We got rid of the old theme we were using (Mystere) and brought in a more modern looking one from WordPress, named ‘Plane’. The blog has also been officially renamed. It is now to be known as ‘HEM News Agency’, to better reflect the content and premise of the blog. The old name “The Half-Eaten Mind Blog” is still acceptable however, and we are keeping it as an unofficial pseudonym (not sure if this would be the right word for it).

Nowadays, an increasingly number of websites are going for the flat design trend, shafting the gradients and gimmicks of old and going for a cleaner and simpler look, with block colours and basic typefaces. The Half-Eaten Mind has joined the fray, and I have spent around 2-3 hours creating new headers and branding with the help of graphic design website Canva. I have spent a good chunk of this morning putting the new branding in place (we had massive trouble with the blog header however, wrong size meant it had to be redone, don’t ever take WordPress’s recommended header measurements as gospel, let me warn you!). The branding also applies to our social media accounts and any related sites like Gravatar. The colours I have used (dark green, sky blue, and slate blue, were chosen as they firstly fit well together, and also they relate to the history of what used to be known as the HEM Blog, in terms of the blog’s previous design. As a mark of respect to how we used to do things, I carried over the famous HEM street sign, which was our semi-official logo for a couple of years. Something new, something old, as people who organise baby showers would say.

We are also introducing new flags at the beginning of our articles. The 7+ year old flags made by FamFamFam (leeched on via StatCounter) will now be replaced by a new set of flags designed by Turkish graphic artist Muharrem Senyil and originally featured on designer’s hangout Dribbble. These flat design-inspired elements suit the new look of HEM News Agency very well, in my opinion.

It has been a great five years at the helm of HEM. I have learnt a lot and made many friends. This blog was originally set up partly to help me enter the journalism profession. While I did not ultimately realise that dream as of yet (stiff competition for jobs!), the blog indirectly helped me score a second job which I have now been working in for two years, as a writer, creative consultant and social media manager for a small consultancy focussed on finance and education between Africa and Europe.

I’m not going to sing like a canary and say it was all plain sailing. There were times when I felt like giving up the blog, as I have now have less time to write on weekends than when I first started. But then I would be giving up my dreams and talents needlessly, and I would disappoint a lot of friends, fans and supporters. I did feel the blog needed a makeover, as it was looking a bit outdated and stale, and hopefully this spring clean and makeover will help breathe new life into this baby of mine.

Don’t worry though, we will still be releasing the same news stories, features and personal blogposts that made HEM what it is. That is not going to change.

I hope you all like the new look and name and please feel free to comment or give your feedback if you prefer.

Let’s look forward to another five years of great news, features and writing, and many more memorable experiences and lessons along the way.

In celebration of the festival of lights, Diwali, which arrives this year on the Wednesday, 11th of November and which coincides with Armistice Day in the UK, the Half-Eaten Mind has unveiled a special commemorative graphic.

The graphic is part of a long tradition on the blog for what is termed in the business as ‘homemade graphics’. Every Diwali since 2013, HEM’s blogger and editor Vijay Shah uses his graphic designs skills to produce special edition graphics which serve as not only a bit of fun and celebration, but also as a tip of the hat to the talent that goes on behind the scenes.

This year’s image is derived from a wallpaper offered by HappyDiwaliGreetings.in and created via image design site piZap. It features three symmetrical and stylised diyas (lamps) arranged over Paisley patterns in a nod to traditional north Indian art. The design carries the official HEM branding as well as a QR code which when scanned with a suitable app on a mobile phone, can take the viewer to the blog.

The graphic will be featured on the HEM social networks nearer the occasion.

The Half-Eaten Mind would like to wish our readers, supporters and the Community a very happy Diwali in advance.

Photographer and blogger Alex Smithson is soon to release his third book detailing his blogging and photography skills and experience with his blog “Mother Nature”.

The Croydon based blogger is now in the final stages of preparing his new publication, entitled “My Journey Through a Lens“, the third instalment in his highly informative series of self-authored and published e-books made available via his blog.

Alex, whose previous titles were “My Journey Through Photography” and “A Year in Photography“, is currently putting the finishing touches to his latest work, which is slated for release during either this month or in May. A definite date is not yet available, as Alex is having to fit the book writing in between college studies and his blogging on WordPress, but he is already beyond 50,000 words into the manuscript for My Journey Through a Lens, which will weigh in at 303 pages, Alex’s biggest entrance in the e-book world to date. The books chronicle Alex’s experiences and lessons as a blogger showcasing local scenic photography, news stories, historical facts and popular music culture, as well as his experiences in further education.

Indeed the book is set to be Alex’s loftiest project yet, as he will not only include the best articles from Mother Nature over the past year, but will also bring a whole new range of articles from outside the blog, including possibly photography projects from his A-Level course at Croydon College, of which he is currently a first-year student on their Photography course.

In addition to his wide ranging nature and scenery portfolio, My Journey Through a Lens will also feature case studies of famous British historical figures such as Winston Churchill and King Henry VIII, as well as his homages to modern music, most notably his special write-ups on evergreen pop songstress Madonna, and fellow Croydonian and X Factor winner Ben Haenow.

As with his previous titles, Alex Smithson plans to make the e-book free of charge to blog visitors via the online cloud site Dropbox, along with the earlier books in his blogging career. The cover of the book is also designed by Alex, who is a formidable graphic designer in his own right, and incorporates his new blog logo, a black cube with the blog’s initials and slogan in thick chunky white and orange letters.

Exclusively on the Half-Eaten Mind, Alex has supplied some artwork for My Journey Through a Lens. His conceptions for the front and back covers of the e-book, with sharp lines and solid colour influenced by the Mother Nature blog’s design can be seen below, along with a composite image showing the development of the front cover as Alex got the book together. The back cover features several dedications to people that have influenced Alex, include the editor of this very blog. You can visit Alex’s site at the blue-coloured link below and subscribe via email for further updates on his brand new e-book. WordPress bloggers also have the option of clicking on the follow button on the black menu bar at the top of the site in their browser window to follow Mother Nature in their Readers.

(c) A. Smithson

Front cover – depicting the new MN logo.

(c) A. Smithson

Back cover – includes special mentions.

(c) A. Smithson

Side-by-side composite image of Alex’s temporary book cover designs alongside his final draft.

Okay, so I might have completely lost the punchline to this joke, but the popularity and artistic capacity for expression of the userbar certainly isn’t any laughing matter. For almost a decade, gamers, geeks and online artists have used userbars as decorations and virtual badges of honour to announce their presence and creativity on the internet.

So what exactly is a userbar?. It’s a small and slender graphic which is a really skinny version of the ubiquitous advertising banners found all over the web. The big difference though is that they aren’t ads for companies. Instead they are used to express a person’s interests, skills and passions; or to advertise their gaming level and prowess. Cramming a lot into a space usually measuring no more than the standard 350 by 19 pixels (with a border of 1 pixel thick, userbars can be larger though), userbar designers will often incorporate imagery, text and even animations and gifs taken from videos or popular TV shows. The most widely used typeface (font) for userbar text is Visitor TT2 BRK with the standard size of letters set at 13 pixels in height. The font gives a very computer generated and retro appearance to the bar and often, rather like a framed picture, designers can choose to make their userbars visually presentable by applying a ‘glass finish’ that gives the design a glossy look. The natural home of the userbar is usually forums, mainly those connected to gaming or technology, but I have seen them being attached to signatures used in a popular South Asian young people’s forum.

(c) R-a-w-Z/DeviantArt

Userbars reached their zenith in the mid 2000’s, as the internet was already becoming well entrenched in people’s lives and gamers made the transition from downloading PC games to battling and co-operating with fellow hobbyists on online portals such as World of Warcraft. While userbars have never broken the mainstream like other ‘geeky‘ expressions of culture have done, and their popularity has declined since their heyday, userbars still retain a loyal fanbase and several thousand are being painstakingly handcrafted by forum users and passionate gamers today. There are vibrant online communities built around the designing of userbars as a hobby. One, userbars.be, is “a respectful community of creative people who are passionate about creating and sharing userbars they make ” with a showroom of more than 40,000 userbars sorted into categories such as brands, celebrities, computer hardware, patriotic, and sports. The site currently has over 28,000 members and contributors. Another, called userbars.name, is a German-based forum dedicated exclusively to the online art form, the 21st century evolution of the miniature paintings of 17th century India and Persia. It has a cult popularity among gamers from Russia and east Europe in particular.

One of the ideal things about userbars is their democratic nature, and that given such a limited space, there are countless millions of ways to express any vignette of personality or interest you like. Anyone with at least some basic graphic skills can make one, and there are sites, such as best-signatures.com, which offer easy to use userbar generators for the fresh-faced userbar novice. For the experienced artist, photo-editing and image suites like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP offer capabilities for making userbars from scratch and there are web-based tutorials and forums for anyone who wants to learn how to make them using photo-editing software. For those who don’t have the money or the inclination to get to grips with the complicated DIY Photoshop option and are frustrated by online userbar generators, there is also the option of downloading special software that creates userbars without the need for broadband. The one I used for this article is the AmitySource UserBar Generator 2.2, which is a small program that gives you the capability of designing your own bars, using images saved on your computer and your choice of colours and filler effect from a preset menu. Although not without its limitations, such as being only able to use the standard Visitor font and that only in one colour and style, the Userbar Generator is very easy to use, even if you’re utterly new to the game, like I am.

To celebrate the miniscule artistic awesomeness that is the humble userbar, I have used both best-signatures.com and the AmitySource generator to make some userbars of my own. In honour of their original spirit, I drew inspiration from other’s creations to make a series of bars that reflect my personality and interests, as well as things that are special to me. As well as the static userbars, I also found another website, www.myspacegens.com, which will quite happily take up to 10 static ones and blend them into a GIF that shows each individual bar in 2-second intervals, transforming your creations into a sort of uber-cool userbar slideshow. That’s very handy if you have a lot to say and display to your fellow gamers or forum commentators.

**************

STATIC

ANIMATED

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A brief explanation of the static userbars.

1. ANGLO MAURITIAN: This bar represent my ethnic heritage, half-English (British) and half-Mauritian. The image is a pin badge featuring the intertwined flags of the two nations

2. CADBURY’S CREME EGG FAN: In honour of one of my favourite items of confectionary and a childhood favourite. The image is of a batch of the UK version of these sweet treats

3. CASUAL PHOTOGRAPHER: I do like to pull out my phone once in a while and take some jaw-dropping pictures, and I humbly appreciate the great expression of photography as an art. The image is a Nikon camera lens or some other specialist model

4. EMOJI ABUSER: As my Whatsapp and Facebook contacts can attest, I am trigger happy when it comes to emoticons. Well it does save on typing. The image is of a gallery of emojis commonly used on messaging services and social media.

5. FREQUENT WHATSAPP USER: Whatsapp, the almost-free messaging service is very important for me to keep in contact with distant family and friends. I used the app’s logo and made the background the same colours.

6. HALF-EATEN MIND: Why should I have all the fun?. This was the first userbar I made, using the Best Signatures site. In honour of this wonderful blog which helps me express myself and keep the reporting dream alive, I used the blog mascot, Woodsy the Owl, as a background.

7. INFORMA PLC.: Made with pride to represent the company I work for, using their corporate logo.

8. KEBABISH KING: This one is to pay homage to one of my favourite restaurants, Kebabish Original (K.O.). As with the Informa bar, I used their logo.

9. KRAVING FOR KELLOGG’S KRAVE: In honour of one of my favourite breakfast cereals. Full of chocolatey goodness.

10. LONDON COMMUTER: They say if you tire of London, you tire of life. I don’t always enjoy commuting, but it is a fundamental part of my day-to-day life. I used a Transport for London (London Underground) ‘Tube Map’ as a background.

11. NEWHAM RESIDENT: In honour of the London borough where I live and grew up in. The logo is that of Newham Council, our local government body.

12. NEWSPAPER JUNKIE: I can’t get enough of that black and white, baby. In honour of a news media that has inspired my journey as a journalist and taught me so much about the world. Graphic used comes from a picture of various British newspapers.

13. POUND STERLING USER: In honour of my currency of choice when at home. This userbar features Bank of England paper money.

14. PROUD HINDU: This bar celebrates my religious identity. The symbol is ‘Aum’ the first sound to originate in the universe and an identifier of my faith. The orange colour is another marker of my beliefs.

15. REPPIN’ PLAISTOW: A little statement of local pride here, Plaistow is the part of east London where I now live and also grew up in. The logo is a signblind from the N69 night bus which cuts through Plaistow and Stratford. I used to take the daytime 69 route to go to college in Leyton.

16. SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 MINI USER: Influenced by the userbar’s original purpose, I made this one a technology special. The mobile phone in question is my current model.

17. SHANIYA’S UNCLE: I made this in honour of one of my nieces, who I’m very close to. I used a family photo of her and chose pink as a background as it’s her favourite hue.

18. SIMPSONS FAN: Depicting the yellow-skinned family at rest, this bar celebrates one of my all-time favourite cartoons.

19. TAX STAMP COLLECTOR: A homage to one of my pastimes. The picture was supplied by a fellow collector of some stamps I was swapping with him.

20. TRADITIONAL ASIAN DUDE: Paying my respects to one of my ancestral cultures. Unlike a lot of South Asians in the UK, I try to remain close to my roots.

I hope you have enjoyed my userbar collection, and perhaps are inspired to make your own.

By the way, this will be the last article I will be publishing for 2014. This one came out on the 31st December 2014, New Year’s Eve and the very last day of this year. I will not be posting tomorrow, but will be back on Friday 2nd January hopefully. I wish you all a prosperous new year 2015.

From time to time, I like to make little tweaks and improvements to the Half-Eaten Mind. As regular readers are aware, I have some fairly passable graphic design skills which I put to good use in giving a smart, fun and appropriate visual appeal to the blog.

While reading a blogpost by new blogging friend Olga, I chanced across a reference to a website called Canva. This website is a simple-to-use graphic factory online that enables you to produce your own contemporary images for your website. Canva offers its own text templates, backgrounds, cliparts and patterns, many of which are free, which are as high-quality as those used by website designers. You can churn out anything from infographics to Facebook headers and posters for publicity which can be printed in real life.

I decided to take on the awesomeness of Canva and make some new graphics for pages on the blog. With the help of the site’s ready-made templates, resizing, image upload facility and placement rule marking, the graphics I did were practically professional standard, considering this was the very first time I used Canva. I used different, but contemporary styles for each image, combined with creative commons imagery and my own supplied images. You can also obtain images from Canva, but it’s a one-dollar fee per image used. You can download the completed graphic as a JPG or PDF file, but be careful to choose the option for downloading one of the pages (choosing page one) otherwise you will have a fat ZIP file to contend with. With the images below, you probably can see my ‘design personality’ show through, but also I have incorporated elements and colours derived or inspired from the HEM’s branding or previous graphic projects I have undertaken on here.

When it comes to creativity and just making things happen, I’m a bit of a ‘night owl’. That doesn’t mean growing feathers, hooting like an idiot and silently divebombing the local drunkards. But it does explain why we have an owl for the blog‘s mascot. What I really mean is that some of my best ideas, thoughts and plans come to me in the dead of night, when everything is quiet and I’ve got me a space to think.

It was exactly such a night only yesterday that an idea that had brewed around in my mind finally took a concrete form. For a while I have mulled over creating another header for the Half-Eaten Mind, especially once I had confirmed that the Mystique theme that HEM uses could support multiple headers. Now don’t get me wrong, the old header with the dawn sky and tower blocks is good as gold. That image and its reincarnations have been there right from the blog’s start and there is no question of ever letting that go. But now and then I’d like to give the blog a small tweak. Try out new things and move the furniture around a bit.

So last night, I had one of my brainwaves after finding I had a lot of spare time suddenly available on a Friday night, so began sifting through the Images of the Internet looking for the perfect ingredients for that perfect header. As the visual idea of my new project churned around and ran circles in my mind like a ferret on LSD, I was chucking stuff into piZap, the photo-editing software (comes highly recommended by our Woodsy the owl) and then after about thirty minutes….my mind (with loyal assistance from my laptop) gave birth to this….

(c) V. Shah/Half-Eaten Mind/piZap

Ta-dah!!!

My theme for this header is London, by the way. To give you an understanding of how this design came about, let’s take each of the individual parts in turn and I’ll explain why I used them.

BACKGROUND IMAGE (THE BRIDGE):

(c) Irinnicos/HD Wallpapers

The Half-Eaten Mind is based in London, so in keeping with this, I wanted to use an image that is quintessentially all London, but one that both Londoners and people from beyond the M25 motorway would both understand and relate to. I wanted something that would be attractive and bold, yet not liable to get me slammed down with a copyright infringement notice. I found the image I needed on a free wallpapers site. It depicts the Tower Bridge, one of London’s most iconic bridges, a formidable landmark spanning the great river Thames. The bridge looks especially captivating at dusk and night, lit up with floodlights that accentuate the masonry of the structure’s supports. Here the stony hues of the bridge and its yellowish lighting makes a strong, but not overwhelming, contrast with the sky above. Though often a grey concrete jungle when it feels temperamental, London has the ability to really impress with its crown jewels of amazing architecture, where medieval and Victorian rub shoulders with the latest skyscraper project by the Foster Brothers or Zawa Hadid.

The ideal image setting for the Mystique template used in this blog is 940 x 200 pixels. I used a site named picresize, which calls itself the ‘Internet’s best picture resizing tool’ to achieve this. I just uploaded the picture, entered the dimensions, and once the preview was good, downloaded it again before exporting it to the Flash editor in piZap. I did make one minor miscalculation though. I had set the Tower Bridge picture at a length of 960 pixels, 20 pixels overboard. That meant when the final header was done and I uploaded it to the WordPress customiser, I had to crop it a bit, but thankfully without any detriment to the design.

THE BLOG ROAD SIGN:

(c) V. Shah/M. Kampf/MyFunStudio

Again fitting in with the London theme, I decided against using the text normally supplied with piZap and opted to create a logo for the blog which used something that could be customised and look cool. I decided to base the logo on a road or street sign, but not something clichéd. I first thought about motorway signs, but could not find a suitable site to make them on. I changed my focus to road name signs, of which London has plenty, with each borough using its own format/style. During my Google research, I stumbled across this site ‘MyFunStudio‘ by Marijn Kampf. MyFunStudio comes with a special custom ‘London Street Sign’ maker where you can enter your own details and choose font and border colours and create your own take on the iconic central London road nameplate. The style that the customiser uses is the standard used by the city of Westminster and other parts of central London. These street signs, though relatively minimalist in design, have transcended their original purpose and have become synonymous with olde London Towne for many a visitor. Indeed many of the postcard sellers there market cards that simply feature the road sign, usually of a famous throughfare like Oxford Street or Pall Mall.

Using the site’s pre-existing template, I ditched the road name in favour of my blog’s name. The real-life signs carry a set of numbers and letters which are the postal district where the sign is located. The bottom of each sign also displays the issuing authority, the city of Westminster. I changed all that to make the logo geographically relevant to me. So WC2 became E13, the postal district I reside in, and “CITY OF WESTMINSTER” was transformed into “LONDON BOROUGH OF NEWHAM” the borough (local government urban district) where I live. By the way, the Newham road signs look nothing like the sign above. They also show the postal district and use a similar colour scheme, but feature the Newham borough coat of arms on the left-hand side.

THE FLAG ICONS:

(c) M. James/FamFamFam/Icon Archive

They’re a tad on the small side, but if you look to the right of the header, you’ll see three small flags, equally spaced apart. They are in turn, the Union Flag (Union Jack), the banner of the United Kingdom; then in the middle the flag of Mauritius; and lastly the St. George’s flag that represents England in particular. The Union Flag is of course a nod to both my and my blog’s nationality. Please note though that HEM does have an international focus in news stories and a wide-ranging readership from across the globe, so this isn’t an expression of any nationalistic fervour. The Mauritian flag is a homage to my mother’s country of birth and an important part of my personal cultural identity. The English flag was also chosen for similar reasons – as a marker of both personal and a greater regional identity personally, and as a small acknowledgement of respect for the country of my birth. I was in fact born in the Greater London area (the city itself plus suburbs and annexed bits of surrounding counties).

The new header will run concurrently with the old one. When using the site, you will find that if you click on another page or article that the headers change. A third header with a solely news-related theme is in the pipeline, and may be available as early as next week, time permitting.